tl;dr: Try out telecast.company ; share your complaints/gripes on GitHub . 2005 birthed the iPod Video and YouTube . 20 years later… it's 2025. Compare YouTube against the podcast (iPod broadcast) ecosystem. YouTube pisses off its creators, fuels a clickbait thumbnail arms-race, and fosters addiction (protip: disable recommendations ). Podcasters thrive in an ecosystem of interviews, educational content, and long-form journalism. Okay, this is a bit unfair. Trash podcasts exist. Q...

Painted blast door at a Minuteman II missile silo, via Wikipedia. Welcome to the reading list, a list of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at trapped buildings, in-home data centers, cardboard military drones, Brightline’s potential bankruptcy, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items: In this week’s newsletter about how early inventions could ha...

The steam of the espresso machine — of focusing in the milk to make sure it is just right, of tapping to remove the bubbles, of preparing. Soft instrumental music plays in the background, more upbeat than the music to which I was listening earlier — easing me more into the day. How the smile of a barista lights up my day. Of noticing the care and attention put into the latte art. I have not been to a coffee shop in days, and so this morning – a morning where a drizzle of rain hung over the...

In the summer of 1991, Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, self-destructed. The eruption started on June 12, and three days later it culminated in a tremendous explosion. By the time pyroclastic flows — incandescent avalanches of molten rock and gas — tumbled down its sterilized slopes, Pinatubo’s peak had been obliterated and replaced by a 2.5-kilometer-wide chasm. The eruption killed more… Source In the summer of 1991, Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, self-destructed. The...

I really, really want local models to work. I want them to work in the very practical sense that I can open my coding agent, pick a local model, and get something that feels competitive enough that I do not immediately switch back to a hosted API after five minutes. There are a lot of reasons why I want this, but the biggest quite frankly is that we’re so early with this stuff, and the thought of locking all the experimentation away from the average developer really upsets me. Frustrating...

Left:  Venus as it would approximately look to the human eye, imaged by NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft ( full globe view ),  Right:  Radar image (false-color) of Venus’ surface taken by NASA’s Magellan orbiter ( full globe view ) Why explore Venus VERITAS, NASA’s Venus mapper EnVision, Europe’s mission to Venus ISRO’s plan to study Venus in unprecedented detail alongside NASA and ESA Related: Coverage of India’s exploration of Mars ...

Wars aren’t won by those with most cause, but whose story’s best told. Join us at the Tournament of Harrenhal! We are thrilled to announce (albeit later than intended) tickets are on sale for Game of Thrones: The Mad King, a new stage production, opening at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon this summer. The world premiere begins Monday, July 20, and runs through Saturday, September 5. A sweeping new stage epic from the world of George R. R. Martin, scripted by Dun...

In the wake of copy.fail , there are more vulnerabilities that have been announced: Copy Fail 2: Electric Boogaloo Dirty Frag Right now would be one of the best times for a supply chain attack via NPM to hit hard. Outside of Linux kernel patches from your distro, I think it's probably a good idea to put a moratorium on installing new software for a week or so. In the wake of copy.fail , there are more vulnerabilities that hav...

In Many anti-AI arguments are conservative arguments I argued that left-wing anti-AI sentiment 1 is partly a backlash to two unrelated events around the rise of ChatGPT: the crypto mania of 2022 and the pro-Donald-Trump push many big tech CEOs made in 2024. If the timing had been different, we could have had a real pro-AI faction on the left. What would that look like? I’m not going to respond to any of the popular anti-AI arguments (I’ve already done that here ). I think it’s more i...

Walmart employed approximately 2.1 million associates worldwide at the close of fiscal year 2026, holding its position as the largest private employer on the planet. About 1.6 million of those workers are based in the United States. This article covers the latest workforce numbers, pay rates, demographics, country breakdowns, and turnover data tied to Walmart’s global staff. Walmart Employee Statistics 2026 – TLDR Walmart employed 2.1 million associates worldwide as of January 31, 202...

Thirteen years ago I posted this snippet of text from Wikipedia, and joked that it must be how it feels to talk with me when it comes to my more esoteric interests: The GTO thyristor used on 1996 stock achieves this by “chopping” the supply voltage in order to drive a sinusoidal current in the motor windings (pulse width modulation), creating the characteristic audible whine associated with the stock and with the Class 465 Networker trains that share its traction drive system. The sound...

Apple introduced the HomePod mini six years ago , in 2020. I'm not one into smart speakers, but the feature that made me take a closer look was their ability to form stereo pairs, without any direct wired connection. I know there are other speaker manufacturers with wireless speakers, but to my knowledge, Apple was just using AirPlay over WiFi... so how does it work? Through the magic of buying two HomePods mini (pictured above), I found out. A video detailing the process is embedded be...

There weren't a lot of big new announcements from Anthropic at yesterday's Code w/ Claude event, but the biggest by far was the deal they've struck with SpaceX/xAI to use "all of the capacity of their Colossus data center". As I mentioned in my live blog of the keynote , that's the one with the particularly bad environmental record . The gas turbines installed to power the facility initially ran without Clean Air Act permits or pollution control devices, which they got away with by classifyi...

Steering Zig Fmt May 8, 2026 Two tips on using zig fmt effectively. Read this if you are writing Zig, or if you are implementing a code formatter. For me, zig fmt is better than any other formatter I used: rustfmt , the one in IntelliJ, deno fmt . zig fmt is steerable. For every syntactic construct, it has several variations for how it might be laid out. The variation used is selected by looking at what’s currently in a file. Easier to show a pair of examples: f(...

Suppose that x is a variable of an unsigned type. In C/C++, it could be of type size_t for example. You have an expression like 6 * x and you want to know whether 6 * x overflows. That is, you want to know if 6 * x exceeds the range of values that can be represented by the type. In most cases, a variable of type size_t will be about to represent all values in the range [0, 2^64-1] . Instead of 64, let me use a variable for the number of bits: [0, 2^L-1] . The easiest approach i...

Oh you mean like with audio output instead Nope. No output at all. Just input. With the keyboard. Why Short answer: why not? Long answer: James floated this idea at IWC / BTconf of a PC that's just a keyboard for taking notes; and I said that's totally doable and probably not hard at all to do, since computers that are inside a keyboard already exist. So here's me putting my money where my mouth is. Read more on the site… Oh you mean like with audio output instead No...

Ok, that's it. I'm officially off GitHub. First I moved all of my private repos to my Synology, which was extremely easy to do. I did that around a week or so ago and it's be working great. Then I had to start sorting and moving all my public repos to Codeberg . Many were archived as I no longer maintained the projects, which left me with just 7 actual repos that I needed to move. Pure Blog/Comments and Simple.css were the most challenging as they all had other people who relied on them, ...

The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early, primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the whole thing difficult. It is generally considered that the US Civil War was the first use of submarines in combat; these were primitive machines with very limited operating endurance and navigational capabilities. These submarines were more like torpedoes: you pointed...

Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos founded Amway in 1959 on the premise that anyone with enough ambition and the right social network could build a business by selling cleaning products to friends and neighbors. The products were real; the business opportunity was considerably more complicated. Amway is the founding institution of multi-level marketing (MLM), an industry that by the 2020s had enrolled an estimated 120 million people worldwide. The business model compensates them not just for selling...

Right now there’s a cruise ship parked outside Cabo Verde because of an outbreak of Andes virus . Yep, another cruise ship. I don’t get the appeal. It’s like a big open-air serial passage experiment: you get a bunch of old people with failing immune systems in close contact and race a pathogen through them. How much should I worry about this? Is this early January of 2020? I tried asking Claude but the biosecurity filter kept blocking my queries. The WHO says : Alth...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nicola Losito, whose blog can be found at nicolalosito.it . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Nicola Losito. Born in the mi...

Marc Andreessen Egg Game Marc Andreessen Egg Game is a game about doodling on eggs to make them look like Marc Andreessen. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/marc-andreessen-egg-game Marc Andreessen Egg Game Marc Andreessen Egg Game is a game about doodling on eggs to make them look like Marc Andreessen. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/marc-andreessen-eg...

Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child’s drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up on the walls within the artist’s house—and no further. Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child...